IBM 10-petaflop Blue Gene/Q supercomputer is quite Mira-culous

Tony Austin
Tuesday, 15 February 2011 09:57

Business IT - Technology

IBM has announced that the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory will use IBM's next-generation Blue Gene supercomputer to enable significant advances in areas such as designing ultra-efficient electric car batteries, understanding global climate change and exploring the evolution of the universe.

In the ever-onwards game of leapfrog in the supercomputer field, IBM's frog certainly has made a major leap over its competitors. (Indeed iTWire's David Heath wrote about the leapfrogging only last November, see his story China takes two of the top three supercomputer places.)

The 10-petaflop IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer, code-named 'Mira', will be operational in 2012 and made available to scientists from industry, academia and government research facilities around the world.

"Computation and supercomputing are critical to solving some of our greatest scientific challenges, like advancing clean energy and understanding the Earth's climate," said Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for computing, environment and life sciences at Argonne National Laboratory.  "Argonne's new IBM supercomputer will help address the critical demand for complex modeling and simulation capabilities, which are essential to improving our economic prosperity and global competitiveness."

Argonne National Laboratory will use IBM's next-generation Blue Gene/Q supercomputer to stoke economic growth and improve U.S. competitiveness for such challenges as designing electric car batteries, understanding climate change and exploring the evolution of the universe.

The 10 petaflop system, named "Mira", will be twice as fast as today's fastest supercomputer, providing a strong science and technology engine that will fuel national innovation. Argonne is one of the U.S. Department of Energy's oldest and largest labs for science and engineering research, located some 20 minutes outside Chicago, IL (Feature Photo Service).

Argonne's current supercomputer, Intrepid, is an IBM Blue Gene/P machine capable of producing over 500 trillion calculations a second. Mira will be 20 times faster, running programs at 10 quadrillion calculations a second. If every man, woman and child in the United States performed one calculation each second, it would take them almost a year to do as many calculations as Mira will do in one second.

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) is already working with potential users as part of the "Early Science Program," a program designed to get researchers working on the most effective ways to leverage the computer's power as soon as it is installed.

Argonne and DOE have selected 16 projects from a pool of proposals, in a wide variety of disciplines that will be the first to gain access to Mira's capabilities. These span a diverse range of projects from reducing energy inefficiencies in transportation and developing advanced engine designs to spurring advances in energy technologies.

The progress made during the Early Science Program should enable researchers to quickly leverage Mira's computational capability to reach their science goals soon after it is deployed.

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